If elected leaders want to help their constituents through these difficult economic times, they might be well-advised to read the results of a recent Gallup poll that shows 59 percent of Americans support unions and 77 percent support strong union laws such as the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).The legislation would give employees the freedom to make their own choice about whether to have a union in their workplace without interference from management. The EFCA also creates real penalties for employers who illegally interfere with organizing efforts and sets up a system to ensure that workers get a first contract once they’ve chosen union representation.
Does America want the EFCA, also known as majority sign-up legislation? Sixty-three percent of survey respondents feel unions should have more influence or the same amount that currently exists at the workplace. Additionally, the survey reveals that 60 million workers say they would join a union today if they could, and that an average of at least 55 percent of Americans have supported unions since 1936. The poll results were released in early December.
Throughout 2008, Seafarers helped the AFL-CIO achieve its goal of collecting one million signatures on specially prepared cards sent to the next administration in support of the EFCA. The SIU and its affiliated unions distributed theses cards to ports, properties and locations where members live and work.
The EFCA passed in the House in 2007 but got stalled in the Senate. President-Elect Barack Obama, Vice President-Elect Biden and numerous members of Congress have pledged to support the bill and see it through so it becomes law.
Union members are encouraged to educate coworkers and family members about the advantages of the EFCA and ask them to sign up to support it.
More details are on the web site www.freechoiceact.org/aflcio
EFCA Questions & Answers
The following questions and answers about the Employee Free Choice Act come from the AFL-CIO, to which the SIU is affiliated.Q: Why do we need new federal legislation, the Employee Free Choice Act?
A: America’s working people are struggling to make ends meet, and the middle class is disappearing.
The best opportunity working men and women have to get ahead is by uniting with co-workers to bargain with their employers for better wages and benefits. But the current labor law system is broken.
Corporations routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire people who try to organize unions—and today’s labor law is powerless to stop them. Every day, employers deny working people the freedom to make their own choice about whether to have a union:
■ Employees are fired in one-quarter of private-sector union organizing campaigns;
■ 78 percent of private employers require supervisors to deliver anti-union messages to the workers whose jobs and pay they control;
■ And even after workers successfully form a union, one-third of the time they are not able to get a contract.
Q: What does the Employee Free Choice Act do?
A: It does three things to level the playing field for employees and employers:
■ Strengthens penalties for companies that illegally coerce or intimidate employees in an effort to prevent them from forming a union;
■ Brings in a neutral third party to settle a contract when a company and a newly certified union cannot agree on a contract after three months;
■ Establishes majority sign-up, meaning that if a majority of the employees sign union authorization cards, validated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a company must recognize the union.
Q: What’s wrong with the current law?
A: The National Labor Relations Act states:
“Employees shall have to the right to self organization to form, join, or assist labor organizations.…”
It was designed to protect employee choice on whether to form unions, but it has been turned upside down. The current system is not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. Employers have turned the NLRB election process into management-controlled balloting—the employer has all the power, controls the information workers can receive and routinely poisons the process. On top of that, the law’s penal ties are so insignificant that many companies treat them as just another cost of doing business. By the time employees vote in an NLRB election, if they can get to that point, a free and fair choice isn’t an option. Even in the voting location, workers do not have a free choice after being browbeaten by supervisors to oppose the union or being told they may lose their jobs and livelihoods if they vote for the union.
Q: What is majority sign-up, and how does it work
A: When a majority of employees votes to form a union by signing authorization cards and those authorization cards are validated by the federal government, the employer will be legally required to recognize and bargain with the workers’ union.
Majority sign-up is not a new approach. For years, some responsible employers have taken a position of allowing employees to choose, by majority decision, whether to have a union. Those companies have found that majority sign-up is an effective way to allow workers the freedom to make their own decision—and it results in less hostility and polarization in the workplace than the failed NLRB process.
Q: Does the Employee Free Choice Act take away so-called secret ballot elections?
A: No. If one-third of workers want to have an NLRB election at their workplace, they can still ask the federal government to hold an election.
The Employee Free Choice Act simply gives them another option—majority sign-up.
“Elections” may sound like the most democratic approach, but the NLRB process is nothing like any democratic elections in our society—presidential elections, for example—because one side has all the power. The employer controls the voters’ paychecks and livelihood, has unlimited access to speak against the union in the workplace while restricting pro-union speech and has the freedom to intimidate and coerce the voters.
Q: Does the Employee Free Choice Act silence employers or require that they remain neutral about the union?
A: No. Employers are still free to express their opinion about the union as long as they do not threaten or intimidate workers.
Q: Will employees be pressured into signing union authorization cards?
A: No. In fact, academic studies show that workers who organize under majority sign-up feel less pressure from co-workers to support the union than workers who organize under the NLRB election process. Workers who vote by majority signup also report far less pressure or coercion from management to oppose the union than workers who go through NLRB elections. In addition, it is illegal for anyone to coerce employees to sign a union authorization card. Any person who breaks the law will be subject to penalties under the Employee Free Choice Act.
Q: Who supports the Employee Free Choice Act?
A: The Employee Free Choice Act has the support of hundreds of members of Congress of both parties, academics and historians, civil and human rights organizations such as the NAACP and Human Rights Watch, most major faith denominations and a strong majority of the American public.
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